Robbie Birkner’s Blog

I am extremely pleased to share our latest Press Release with you. I have personally known Darshaun for > 10 years now, who has become a good friend. He is a great individual with an awesome team in Japan. We just spent a week of amazing meetings together with some very interesting potential clients in Japan!

Exclusive distribution partnership will deliver the most comprehensive set of Japanese language domain services and support for registrars, resellers, and hosting companies in the country of Japan.

Vancouver, CANADA – September 18, 2010 – HEXONET GmbH (www.hexonet.net) announced today an exclusive distribution agreement with WIXI Inc. of Japan. The agreement gives WIXI exclusive rights to provide HEXONET’s industry leading domain platforms and services to Japanese registrars, resellers, and hosting companies. WIXI’s extensive knowledge and experience in the Japanese market will be leveraged to completely transform HEXONET’s technology to perfectly meet the higher support and language specific needs of Japanese companies.

HEXONET has been rapidly growing and now services over a million domains on behalf of its registrar and reseller clients around the world. Innovative technology has always been the key to the company’s success, like its newest service, an Expression of Interest (EOI) service platform, which allows API based reservation of any thousand new pending gTLD offerings from ICANN. Though technology is critical for resellers and registrars, in some countries, language trumps technology, not matter how good it is. And for these countries, HEXONET needs to find the right partner. For Japan, the perfect partner is WIXI Inc.

“Japan is an interesting and ripe market for HEXONET, however a very difficult one to conquer,” said Robert Birkner, HEXONET’s Chief Strategy Officer. “The President of WIXI, Darshaun Nadeau, is a renown expert on the Japanese domain market, his knowledge and his team’s experience will be able to build the relationships and provide the services in Japanese like no one else; this partnership allows HEXONET to focus only on delivering the best technology, which is exactly what we do.”

Darshaun Nadeau, President of WIXI Inc. believes the partnership between the two companies is perfectly matched for the Japanese market. According to Darshaun, “HEXONET is the most functional, reliable, and fastest registrar platform of its kind and is the platform of choice for WIXI’s itself; together we are going to dominate the Japanese market.”

As a fluent speaker of Japanese and a former resident of Japan, I have always tried to keep my finger on the pulse the country including technology and Internet trends. I thought I would take this opportunity to shed some light on the domain market in Japan and in particular the Japanese country-code Top-Level Domain (ccTLD) .JP.

Considering Japan is the third largest economy in the world with over 127 million inhabitants and an Internet penetration rate of 78%, one would think that the domain market in Japan would be large and highly developed. The strange thing is that it is not. Currently there are only 1,190,404 registered .JP domains. To put this number into perspective, the UK with only 61 million people has nearly 9 million registered .UK domains. More starkly, Canada with just 33 million people has almost 1.5 million registered .CA domains. To get some answers as to why .JP is so under utilized, I turned to an active domainer in the Japanese market and here are his conclusions:

1) The co.JP domain for many years was the only extension available for registration. Tight regulations like having to show proof of business registration to even qualify to purchase the domain of one’s own company name (to ensure that only Sony Corporation can buy sony.co.jp) made it difficult and discouraging for many small businesses.